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and cultural studies across multiple intra‐African regions, languages, and traditions. Even for comparatists, the tendency is most often to frame “African literature” as a composite unit of analysis, alongside one or more literary traditions from other parts of the world, one of which is usually Western European. As students of African literatures, then, the prevailing situation is such that we often end up knowing a lot about one region, and much less about other regional or national traditions. Against this background, each of the chapters that introduce the regions in Parts I–IV will be of interest to the reader whose primary area of interest lies elsewhere. The book’s organization allows readers to appreciate differences between the regions and see how, amid the differences, some issues and concerns recur, together with innovative artistic responses.

      All the chapters are attentive to the rich discursive genealogies of African literatures even as they are informed by recent developments in literary and cultural criticism. Contributors speak in various ways to issues of nationhood, transnationalism, diaspora, media and digital culture, gender and sexuality, and race. They explore such questions as the following. How have the literatures taken shape since their current modern manifestation and proliferation? What are the major questions and lines of interpretation enlivening African literary and cultural criticism at the present time? Who are the most visible writers, and how do issues of marginality and exclusion emerge? What are the interactions between the literatures and audio‐visual forms made possible by digital media? How might the study of African literatures inflect ongoing conversations about nationalism, identities, and violence in the age of globalization? In addressing such questions, the chapters inform us and also model how we may approach specific texts and traditions within the wide span of African literatures.

      There is more than one way of benefiting from A Companion to African Literatures. Readers can decide on specific sections or chapters upon which to concentrate, or undertake a methodical engagement of the entire volume. It is assumed that readers will probably come to the volume with different levels of prior grounding in African literatures. Depending on whether they are advanced interlocutors or non‐specialist beginners, readers will in all probability get varying rewards – varying but substantively robust – from the book. Indeed, only such variation will be properly commensurate with the breadth and heterogeneity of the literatures.

      Considered as a whole, the volume raises questions and opens conversations; it does not close them. Contributors developed individual chapters in line with their methodological preferences, paying attention to issues that may be specific to the literary tradition or confluence of traditions. The chapters, including the introductory overviews that open Parts I–IV, do not take the form of simple “surveys” in the traditional sense, and coverage is not the goal. Rather, the approach is to explore the different literatures in relation to selected aesthetic, social, historical, or philosophical questions. Some chapters dig deep into well‐studied writers, others introduce less‐studied figures or newer artistic exertions. Contributors thereby elucidate the social conditions, intellectual contexts, and aesthetic textures of the literatures.

In a volume devoted to networks of cultural objects as capacious as “African literatures,” some gaps and omissions are unavoidable. Readers will undoubtedly see areas they would have liked covered or issues they would have liked taken up. As already indicated, the volume is not designed to accomplish what advocates of traditional literary studies would call “coverage.” The option adopted in A Companion to African Literatures is to be selective and cognizant of the advantages, as well as limits, of the choices made. To give one illustration: of the hundreds of non‐European languages in use in Africa, only literatures in Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba are represented in this book. It is of course always important to challenge conservative and essentialist views on indigeneity and foreign‐ness. Likewise, it is productive to take seriously the understanding that Afrikaans, English, French, and Portuguese are by now African languages too, used in official discourses as well as in the daily lives of Africans. Nonetheless, in a volume such as this, and without mystifying indigeneity as essence, the utmost ideal would be to have more chapters devoted to literary traditions in precolonial or “indigenous” African languages. That has not been possible here. However, the hope is that the chapters devoted to African literatures in the precolonial languages will serve to attune readers not only to these literatures in themselves, but also to the vibrancy of multiple languages, expressive practices, and literatures on the continent. Thus, by the lights of what it covers, A Companion to African Literatures hopefully draws attention to the need for, and possibilities of, further study.

      Taken together, the chapters that follow confront us with questions and insights about language, the contact of histories and peoples, and the existential dimensions of African literatures and related arts. In this way, A Companion to African Literatures equips readers to appreciate anew the heterogeneity of Africa as well as the broadening meanings of the literatures it continues to set in motion.

Part I East and Central Africa

1 East and Central Africa: An Introduction

       Grace A. Musila

      Apart from the annual ritual of declaring Ngugi wa Thiong’o the preferred winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, other tropes that come up when mapping Eastern and Central African literary imaginaries are: Taban lo Liyong’s infamous declaration of East Africa as a literary desert; the Makerere Conference of 1962; the abolition of the English Department; and the seeming overshadowing of Malawi, Zambia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti by the region’s literary and economic powerhouses, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

      In his preface to a study of East African literature co‐authored with Evan Mwangi, Simon Gikandi underscores what he terms a “strong sense of regionality” in East African literatures, which he considers to be partly a result of the region’s attempt to sustain political and economic stability in the 1960s and 1970s, while other parts of the continent were rocked by strife; but also, because the region’s authors enjoyed access to a flourishing publishing industry and academy which were heavily invested in the promotion of literary culture (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, vii). Gikandi also attributes the relative youth of Anglophone East African writing to three factors: the relative smallness of the region and its population; its belated colonial contact that meant late establishment of colonial institutions central to literary production; and its writers’ regional locatedness, in comparison to writers from elsewhere (vii). For Gikandi, this regionalized sensibility had two effects: regional household names such as Okot p’Bitek remained unknown elsewhere for a long time, while the region’s Anglophone writing found itself doubly‐marginal, both in African literary history and relative to the region’s indigenous‐language literatures. Remarkable in this regard is the case of Anglophone literatures in Tanzania and Ethiopia, both of which retain much stronger local language (Swahili and Amharic, respectively) literatures.

Ethiopia and Tanzania both have a much older and larger catalogue of African‐language writing compared to English‐language writing. In both cases, history has had a major hand in crafting this literary scene: Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika and Zanzibar) was initially a German colony (1880–1919); after World War I, Germany handed Tanganyika over to Britain. An important fragment for Tanzania’s literary history is the Maji Maji resistance (1905–1907), in which various communities of Southern Tanganyika came together to protest forced labor in cotton plantations, among other grievances. While Tanganyika suffered heavy fatalities due to German‐engineered famine and war casualties – prophet Kinjeketile Ngwale’s reassurance that the special water would render combatants bulletproof failed to materialize – the resistance nonetheless distilled local communities’ grievances and enabled them to articulate these to themselves and the Germans in ways that earned the resistance an iconic place in Tanzanian national history. The resistance is the subject of one of the best known and most widely performed and taught Tanzanian plays: Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile (1970), easily an anticolonial classic, in the same category as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1977). L. A. Mbughuni (1984, 256–257) emphasizes that both plays cast a glance back at Kenyan and Tanzanian histories

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